Digital Transformation is Hard. Software Can Help

Making a website work for your company is a lot more than just designing something cool.( Image courtesy Shutterstock/ronstik)

Transitioning an enterprise into the digital world is not easy. It requires an organization-wide effort to prepare and invest in tools and services that enable the transformation. Companies also need to measure the impact of poor user experience online. The Enterprise Management Associates’ (EMA) 2015 survey-based research on “How Application Intelligence Powers Digital Transformation” arrived at some interesting findings. Some of them are below.

85% of companies are engaged in digital transformation initiatives. Poor online user experience makes or breaks a business, and every enterprise is aware of the risks of potentially losing revenue, brand loyalty, and market share. Over 50% of companies said user experience has become a priority, and that application performance improvements have a strong impact on overall application quality and customer satisfaction. The cost of downtime varies widely, depending on business-specific aspects of customer-facing applications, such as size, the industry vertical involved, and the amount of revenue connected to the site. One interview with a consumer technology manufacturer reported a per-outage cost that averaged $1.5 million. Poor application performance impacts the bottom line in other ways as well: about 50% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, and 40% will abandon a site that requires more than three seconds of loading time. For a site generating $100,000 per day in revenue, a one-second page delay can cost $2.5 million in lost sales annually.

Application performance is more than just an IT concern. Companies that have proven successful in digital transformation all had one thing in common: they valued technology as a key driver for business success. These companies were also more likely to adopt specific solutions, such as application performance management (APM) to maintain that success. The research reinforces the perceived value proposition of APM solutions for service continuity, service performance, and, ideally, change management. While both IT and business user participants saw APM as improving the reliability and consistency of digital services, IT’s focus was on managing change and visibility while the business focus was on performance. From an IT viewpoint, the onslaught of virtualization, cloud, and the challenges of continuously putting new code into production all contribute to the challenge of managing dynamic ecosystems. From the business perspective, application performance is now critical to customer and market retention.

To succeed in digital transformation, an enterprise needs a unified application performance platform. It’s important to invest in comprehensive application performance tools, but the critical component is ensuring you have the right tools tailored for your organization. A solution that integrates both application performance and end-user monitoring (EUM) to generate distinctive combinations of metrics and analytics helps support the higher-level goal of improving an end-user experience.

AppDynamics provides a mix of APM, EUM, and next-generation analytics specifically designed to meet the needs of the digital business. As the application intelligence company that provides enterprise with the next generation of APM software to monitor, manage, analyze, and optimize customer experiences and the most complex software environments behind them, AppDynamics is the unified platform that incorporates the capabilities required to succeed on a journey to digital transformation.

Matt Chotin heads product marketing at AppDynamics.

For more insights about the challenges of digital transformation, join AppDynamics at “Techonomy NYC: A Transformed Economy: Man, Machines and the Network” on May 26 at NYU. Details of the conference are here. Contact Tracy Loughlin (Tracy@Techonomy.com) if you’d like to attend.